Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile (15 page)

T
hat puts our record at 9-6 and with a win or a tie we’ll make it into the playoffs and save a tumultuous season. Our opponent is the 49ers. They’re 6-9. It’s a cold New Year’s Eve day in Denver. There is snow on the ground and a chill in the air. I say hello to a few old friends during warm-ups. Things have gone south for the organization since I left. But they tell me they’ve got something special for us. They’re going to send our asses home. We’ll see, motherfuckers! We’ll see.

On a punt return in the first half I initiate contact with my man on the line of scrimmage and try to sustain my block down the field but he’s too fast and I have to sprint to keep up with him. He’s running straight for our returner Darrent Williams, with a step on me already. Just as D-Will catches the ball I give one last burst and try to position myself so I can block my man without clipping him. I dip my shoulder and push him hard, a borderline block in the back. He misses Darrent but flies into Curome Cox, one of our defensive backs. Gets him in the legs. Curome crumples to the ground and grabs his knee. I’m off balance and run straight into Darrent. He bounces off me and runs up the sideline for a 34-yard return.

Curome lies on the ground, attended to by Greek, Boublik, and Corey. Eventually he gets up and walks to the sideline. He’s okay, after all. I tell him I’m sorry. Then I have a laugh with Darrent.

—I thought you were tryin’ to tackle me, Nate! Damn!

—I was!

—Ha! Already!

D-Will always says “Already.” It can mean anything, depending on the situation. Usually it means that everything is well and good. You already know.

Jay takes a shot to the head in the ensuing drive. He’s woozy and has to come out of the game. Jake goes in for a series and throws an interception, much to the chagrin of the JEN crowd. Still, we go into halftime up 13–3. Jay shakes off the vapors and reenters the game in the second half. After a touchdown pass by Alex Smith, Jay throws an interception of his own that is returned for a touchdown. The life is sucked from the stadium with an audible hissing sound, like a balloon deflating. Without a specific quarterback to blame, the desperation becomes a heavy blanket of inevitability that suffocates us on the field.

The game goes into overtime. Twice we have the ball and twice we have to punt from our own territory. That means twice I have to block their special teams ace coming off the edge trying to stuff the kick. I am the wing on the right side: one yard off the line of scrimmage and one yard off the ass of our end. I knew all week long that I would have my hands full with this dude. On film he was a beast. He blocked several kicks during the season and always made the wing look stupid. He has a three-step up-and-under move that is very good but that I know I can stop. But knowing and doing are much different.

We line up for our first punt in overtime. He digs his feet into the dirt and gets his ass high in a sprinter’s stance. I picture the worst-case scenario: He runs right through me, blocks the kick and returns it for a touchdown. Game over. Have a nice life. The thought makes me sick. I dig my feet into the dirt, lowering myself in my stance. I can see his breath coming out from under his helmet. The ball snaps and he fires out: one-two-three steps and cuts hard across my face. I’m there to meet him with a good pop.

—Ahhh!

He laughs and mumbles something as he peels around the backside and chases the ball down the field. Fifteen minutes later and we have to punt again. The punt is identical to the last one; except this time Alex Smith drives the Niners’ offense close enough to the end zone and Joe Nedney hooks in a field goal to send us home for the off-season. The balloon flutters flat to the frozen grass.

I
wake up at eight the next morning to a phone full of missed calls and texts. I am groggy from the night out after the game. I call Kyle.

—Kyle, what’s up, man? What’s going on?

—You don’t know yet?

—Know what?

Pause.

—D-Will got shot last night.

—What?

—He’s dead, Nate.

He’s dead.

The words rip through my head, tearing apart everything I know to be true. From the moment he was drafted two season earlier, Darrent was a light in the darkness. He was a spark of energy in the locker room. He had a smile for everyone. Fuck football. He was a good person.

As the day unfolds, I find out what happened. After the game, while some of us were at a bar called Spill, another large group of teammates and friends and family were a few miles away at a club called the Shelter. There was a fight in the street after the club let out and security broke it up. Some of our group jumped into a Town Car, but most of them got into a white Hummer limo. The guys they were fighting ran off and got into a white Ford Bronco.

A few blocks from the club, the white Bronco pulled alongside the white Hummer limo. The driver reached across his passenger and opened fire on the Hummer with a .40-caliber handgun. The limo was full and the music was loud so no one heard the shots.

D-Will was sitting next to Javon Walker, who was keeping track of D-Will’s chain through the scuffle. Javon was in the middle of a sentence when D-Will slumped over into his lap. Javon was confused, laughing midsentence and trying to pull D-Will back up. Then the windows shattered and everyone heard the shots and dropped to the floor. The limo pulled off the road. The Bronco sped off. Two other people were hit, neither of them badly.

But D-Will was hit in the jugular. Javon pulled him outside of the limo and tried to resuscitate him but the wound was too much. He bled to death in seconds. Darrent Williams died on New Year’s morning of 2007 in the Denver snow, ten hours after playing in an NFL football game.

W
e all instinctively show up at the facility when we find out. We sit in our lockers and look around the room bewildered. Someone tell us what to do. Tell us this isn’t really happening. I look at D-Will’s locker: the locker of a working football player. His jerseys and sweats and sweatshirts are on hangers. His helmet is on the hook. His shoulder pads are on the shelf. Pairs of shoes, lotion, tape, papers. I know he’ll come walking around the corner at any moment and sit down at his locker with that smile on his face. He isn’t dead. None of this happened. Nothing can get into our football bubble. Nothing gets past this locker room. D-Will grew up in a rough neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas, and while some of his buddies got into the street life, his football talent kept him out of it. He’s a father, a son. His life is just starting.

We are supposed to be at the facility for our exit physicals anyway, but the protocol crumbles under the weight of the moment. We are deaf, dumb, and blind. In our football lives, we pretend we are invincible, because we have to keep on playing. In reality, we are fragile and we are afraid.

The next day we have an informal memorial service at our facility. People share their stories, their thoughts, and cry with one another. Darrent’s mother, Rosalind, flies in from Texas and comes to grieve with us. She amazes me. She is so strong, so composed in the face of tragedy. We are falling apart all around her and she stands up in front of us and tells us, a group of one hundred grown men, frightened men, that everything is okay. Everything is going to be okay.

O
ur last team trip of the year is to Darrent’s funeral in Dallas–Fort Worth. Our entire team and staff make the journey. The service is all power and glory and spirit and raw emotion in a packed evangelical church. They welcome us with love. I sit motionless on the wooden pew looking at the pictures of D-Will in the program for the service. I knew him. But I didn’t know him like these people knew him. I wish I had.

After the service we file back onto the bus. Jake is sitting in front of me. We look out the window as D-Will’s loved ones walk slowly out of the church, some crying, some smiling, some at peace, some not. Jake turns back to me.

—Man, Nate. You know what I can’t stop thinking about? I mean, if I would have played better on Sunday, you know? When Jay got hurt for those two series and I went in, I mean, if we would have won the game.

—What do you mean?

—You know what I mean. If we would have won the game then we would have made the playoffs and guys wouldn’t have been out partying like that, and . . . I don’t know, I just can’t stop thinking about—

—Man, you gotta stop that. There’s nothing anyone could have done.

—I don’t know, man. I don’t know.

We sit in silence. Football is nowhere to be found. Life swallows us whole. The bus pulls away from the church.

7

Pointy Balls

(2007)

W
hat is it with the pointy balls?

—It makes them easy to throw. They spin through the air and travel really far that way.

—Uh huh. And what about all of that armor you wear? Is that really necessary? I mean, isn’t that a little, I don’t know, cowardly? Are you boys afraid of a few bumps and bruises?

—We get plenty of bumps and bruises. The armor makes it more violent. It’s a dangerous sport
because
of the armor. The helmets are made of hard plastic and metal and that allows you to use your head like a spear. You can hurl yourself at your opponent with no regard for your body.

—Well. I’m not sure I like
that
. Okay, one more question. What is it with all of the starting and stopping and the discussions and conferences you all seem to be having with each other? What could possibly be so important?

This one is more difficult to answer. I’m sitting in a loft just off Las Ramblas in Barcelona, Spain, with a few new friends: Andy, Dan, and Lucy. A Scotsman and two Brits. After D-Will died I sank into a hole. When I crawled out I came to Europe. The NFL off-season is about three months long if you don’t make the playoffs. It goes by very fast. I want to try to enjoy this one. I’m single and free for the first time in my career. But I’m confused about my life as a pro athlete and embarrassed that I feel this way. You’re living the dream, boy! What do you possibly have to complain about?

We pass around a spliff and trade culturalisms. They think it’s something of a novelty to be chatting with an American footballer in Barcelona. Especially Lucy. She has plenty of questions. The dream isn’t so dreamy to her, either, the more I explain the situation. My friend murdered, my body in pain, my nerves fried, my relationship exploded, my life a series of yes-sirs. And a few days earlier another teammate had died unexpectedly. One of our running backs, Damien Nash, collapsed shortly after playing in a charity basketball game and died of heart failure. He was a happy, optimistic player working his way into the league. Another vibrant young athlete is dead. The palace walls are closing in.

The NFL bubble is well formed. It keeps almost everything out: everything but the big stuff. When tragedy intrudes no one knows what to do. We are ill-prepared for life. We don’t know how to handle our emotions.

—Yes, but Nathan, darling, that isn’t an American football problem.

—You don’t think?

—Certainly not. It’s the same thing in my life. Everyone is always so distracted, simply cannot be bothered. And when something happens, or someone is honest for once, or someone shows a moment of vulnerability, they’re punished for it.

—Yes! Because people see it as a weakness that they’re trying to convince themselves they don’t have, so they suppress it themselves by rejecting it in others. But where does it go? It goes somewhere, right?

Andy has a look on his face. Then he speaks with his thick Scottish accent.

—Into our dungeons . . . where it
rots
.

Lucy agrees with him.

—Yes, into the dungeons, with the rest of our real emotions. Our emotions are the only things that we truly have, that are truly ours, and we are taught to reject them.

—Damn. You’re right. So what do we choose instead?

—Darling. Pointy balls, of course.

I
come back to America determined to excavate my dungeons. The first thing I learn is that Jake has retired. He is thirty-two years old and healthy. Still a star quarterback, he’s chosen principle over promise and left the industry that betrayed him. The second thing I learn is that I have a new tight end coach. Brew has accepted the job as the head coach of the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers. Taking his place is Pat McPherson, Jake’s old QB coach. Pat is the son of legendary 49ers coach and executive, Bill McPherson. After a solid college career at Santa Clara University, Pat jumped into the coaching cauldron. He is working his way up the ladder, a pace made slower by the fact that he’s not an asshole.

Soon our off-season conditioning program starts up again, minus number 16 and the “bugfucker.” It’s the first week of April. The off-season program is “optional.” That means if you decide not to do it you’ll be fired. But under the bylaws of the collective bargaining agreement, teams can’t technically require players to participate. They can just strongly hint at its importance. There also can’t be any coaches. It’s just the players, plus Rich and Crime.

There are five workouts a week. If we make it to four out of five, it’s considered 100 percent. We’re paid $110 a day to work out. And they serve breakfast and lunch. Compared to actual football practice and meetings, it’s fun. I like it. All I have to do is show up and work hard.

It’s a two-part workout: the run and the lift. The run is the hardest. It’s usually broken up into three or four stations, which vary from day to day: straight-line sprinting, agilities, quick-feet, hurdles, shuttles, ladders, box jumps, ball drills, and an ingeniously concocted torture contraption: a stable of wooden sleds.

Rich oversees the whole operation. He loves his job and he loves us. Well, most of us. That means that there’s no amount of torture he would require of us that he wouldn’t require of himself twice over. The wooden sleds are the best example. They look similar to hurdles but are much larger and much heavier and have a platform on them upon which Rich can stand and yell in the face of the sled pusher if he wants. But he doesn’t do that. They’re heavy enough already.

We have to push them about forty yards across the field. This is done at the end of a workout involving a few other stations. The cherry on top is a set of twelve. One rep is painful. Twelve is hellfire. The lactic acid builds up so violently in the legs that the skin feels ready to explode. Guys are laid out on the ground panting, vomiting, and crying. Each teardrop that hits the ground fertilizes Rich’s torture garden. He loves to break us down.

Rich regularly pushes twenty or thirty sleds in the mornings before we arrive. On his fiftieth birthday, he came in early as usual. But instead of his normal workout, he honored the landmark by pushing fifty sleds in fifty minutes. That would kill an ox. Rich didn’t break a sweat. I am always excited to hear what crazy-man workout he did while I was still sleeping. But soon I notice a pattern developing. The harder his workouts get, the harder ours get. If a fifty-year-old man can do it, then surely eighty professional athletes in their twenties can, too.

Only that isn’t always the case. Football players are dynamic athletes. We burst. We explode. We do not plod. Our slow-twitch muscles are not refined and when pushed, they crumble. Rich enjoys this immensely. We bitch about it every day. But we need the slow-twitch work. He promises us that if we win the Super Bowl, we can have a bonfire and torch the fuckers. Sorry to spoil the ending, but we never do win that Super Bowl.

Show me a painful ritual and I’ll show you a way to cheat it. The mischievous O-line discovered that the sleds slide better on wet turf, so whether we’re indoors, on the forty-yard synthetic grass field connected to our hangar-size weight room, or outdoors, enterprising slackers squirt down their tracks with water when Rich has his back turned. This makes life much easier. But look out for Crime! He’s the enforcer.

—Don’t water down the grass, Nate!

—C’mon, Nate! Touch the line!

—All the way through, Nate!

—C’mon, Nate! That’s only nine!

—How many times are you going to tie your shoes, Nate?!

Crime is a loyal and humble assistant. Together with Rich they make a daunting duo on the field and in the weight room, where we each have our own folder with our daily lifting regimen inside. Weight lifting is important. But everyone’s body is different. Every body responds differently to the strain. Some guys get too big, too bulky, too weight room strong, and have no mobility on the field. When I moved to tight end I started lifting much heavier. I gained twenty-five pounds. I was much stronger. I lifted incredibly hard. And my body fell to shit.

Champ is a naturally freaky athlete. He does not have to lift weights. One off-season he participated fully with the lifting program, grunting and pressing and pleasing Crime tremendously. All parties agreed: Champ looked better than ever. But by the time the season came around, his body was giving him trouble. He battled injuries all season long, his least healthy as a pro, and learned a valuable lesson that only a guy like Champ could actually pull off: weight lifting isn’t really my thing, coach.

But most of us don’t have that luxury. We lift and run as we are told. No one asks us how we feel. It’s assumed that we feel fine and that we are ready to push on, harder and faster. There simply isn’t time to pay attention to the individual athlete’s body. It’s the industrial football complex. Here’s the program. Go.

But it isn’t bad. I’m nitpicking. My job is to work out. I like working out. And it only makes me feel better about going to Las Vegas, a trip that is already in the works. I’ve been going to Vegas since college, when I had little money and few resources. Just another random dude. If you haven’t been, the random dude experience in Vegas goes like this:

Four guys jump in a Toyota Corolla and drive seven hours from San Jose to Las Vegas and check into their room at Bally’s. Two double beds, two dudes to a bed. They throw their stuff in the room and go down to the casino immediately, hop on the five-dollar blackjack table, and look around for the cocktail waitress. Where the fuck is she? Five dollars a hand and free Coronas until forty to sixty dollars is lost.

Twenty minutes later they’re walking down the Strip with plastic yard-margarita souvenir cups and three-and-a-half-foot straws. Men on the streets hand out cards advertising prostitutes.

—
Vegas showgirls at your door in fifteen minutes!

—Holy shit, bro! I’m calling this girl later. Look at her!

He slides the card into his pocket, to be fingered the rest of the day as they wander the Strip ogling the scenery and playing low-stakes blackjack. One of them is winning. The other three are in the hole. Two have already gone over budget for the trip.

They are all drunk. They stop at McDonald’s in the Paris food court for dinner. They throw french fries at each other. They meet a group of girls near the bar of the casino. The girls are there for a bachelorette party. They are all sucking on dick-shaped lollipops and they have dick-straws in their margaritas. The bride-to-be looks frightened. She is wearing a crown and a sash and has a list in her hand. She decides that one of the dudes is a good candidate for the “Let a random guy take a shot out of your belly button” item on the list. He chooses tequila. The Cuervo stirs up fermented navel bacteria, forms a sexy cesspool. She laughs and it spills down her sides. He slurps it up and fist-pumps. This will be the highlight of the trip.

They say goodbye to the girls and go back to the room to get ready for the night. Tequila-shot guy passes out. The other three shower and change into their best shirts. Tequila-shot guy won’t wake up. They leave him and decide to go to a popular club. They wait in the cab line for thirty minutes and arrive to a hectic scene. There are several long lines to get into the club. Beautiful women are everywhere. The guy with the showgirls card thinks he sees the girl on the card walk past him. He waves. She does not.

They get in the general admission line and wait. They watch people being ushered in past velvet ropes: packs of girls, groups of dudes, shaking hands with bouncers, laughing. The general admission line isn’t moving. They try to get a bouncer’s attention. He pays them no mind. They look at each other. Fuck this. They go to the casino bar and order drinks. They lose one friend to the blackjack table on their way to the bar. He will not be seen the rest of the night. The two remaining random dudes meet another bachelorette party. The rest of the night is a blur: more shots of tequila, low-grade narcotics, lots of walking, a few cab lines, and an after-hours club full of dragon chasers. The two remaining random dudes stumble out of the club into the morning daylight and look around. They cannot find a cab. They don’t have money for one anyway. And they have already reached their withdrawal limit for the day.

They walk back to the room and fall on the beds with their friends, taking care to keep a layer of blanket between them. They sleep until 2 p.m., wake up, and repeat the previous day’s drill. On Sunday they get back in the Corolla and sit in Vegas exodus traffic for the next four hours. Tequila guy pukes out the window, and gets some in the car. They all tell him to go fuck himself. He swears them off as friends, puts on his headphones and pulls on his hood, fakes sleeping. He thinks about his tequila shot.

—Did anyone get a picture of me and that girl?

No one answers him. They ride home in the silence of their self-loathing.

W
hat our Vegas experience as NFL athletes lacks in Cuervo, it makes up for with Patrón. First I go to the bank in Denver and get a large wad of cash. I learn that from Rod. I want to know what I’m spending. The teller smiles knowingly.

—Going to Vegas again?

—Yes, ma’am! But this time I’m bringing some back. In fact I’m gonna double it.

—Yeah, right. Have fun!

The NFL has scattered our friends around the country. This Vegas trip is a chance to get back together. Patrick Chukwurah, a muscly, dreadlocked defensive lineman who we hung out with in Denver, is in Tampa now. Grant is back home in California. Charlie is in Houston with Kube. Kyle and I are still, for the time being, Broncos.

We touch down in Vegas and retrieve our bags. The cab line is too long, we decide. We walk to the other side of the terminal and find an idle SUV. One hundred dollars to the Wynn. Free bottle of water in the cup holder. Definitely worth it.

We check in at the VIP desk. We all have our own rooms and plan to meet downstairs in thirty minutes. It is wise to ease yourself into your Vegas weekend. Don’t walk in the front door of the casino and go straight for the roulette table. Check in, put your bags down, and relax. Have a beer. Go to the pool. Look at the boobies. There will be plenty of time to hate yourself later.